Financial Times: Elizabeth Warren criticises accounting watchdog over BDO audit failures

Members of the US Senate finance committee are demanding tougher enforcement action against accounting firms after a sustained increase in the number of flaws found in their audit work. Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse said deficiency rates that have exceeded 40 per cent for the past two years call into question whether the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board is properly holding the industry to account.

In a letter to the PCAOB seen by the Financial Times, the senators zeroed in on BDO, the sixth-largest accounting firm in the US, where almost all audits examined by inspectors last year were found to have flaws. They asked whether "repeat offenders" are deterred by potential fines that they said are typically "a drop in the bucket" compared with firm revenues.

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